Reviews for Research and Engineering Applications in Rock Masses

The average rating for Research and Engineering Applications in Rock Masses based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-04-09 00:00:00 Steve Fehl This is a densely written book which is rich in ideas. Polanyi was a chemist of the first rank, and the scientific precision with which he expresses himself can be, frankly, tedious; in this respect he reminds me of the phenomenonlogist Edmund Husserl, who was the betrayed mentor of Heidegger. Perhaps Polanyi's key insight is that there is no certainty--not in scientific facts, nor in logic, nor in rationality. Everything that we "know", we have actually made a personal commitment to accept as true. Sounds abstract, but unless anybody has actually met George Bush in person, we have all made individual personal commitments to accept as true that George Bush is currently President of the United States, for example. Polanyi shows that everything we superficially consider to be an incontestable fact is really a personal decision by each one of us to believe somebody else, something we have heard or read, or our own senses--none of which can be considered irrefutably accurate. Polanyi then shows that this commitment to evaluating the trustworthiness of a source and then choosing whether or not to accept its claims as true is, at heart, an ethical decision. Very interesting stuff. One implication is that science is less authoritative than we think, and art is more authoritative than we think, in our individual searches for truth. A second implication is that it is honourable to believe something that cannot be proven. Polanyi's main goal is to strip doubt and skepticism of their position as supreme ethical values in Western culture, which they have held since the time of Descartes; that is why the subtitle to his book is "Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy". Polanyi says that it is more noble and more ethical to believe on the basis of reasons we have chosen with good reason to accept, than to doubt because we are aware that proof is not available. I will include one quote among dozens that are thought-provoking: "The principal purpose of this book is to achieve a frame of mind in which I may hold firmly to what I believe to be true, even though I know that it may conceivably be false." (Page 214) It sounds almost like Nietzsche, but Polanyi admits something that Nietzsche deceitfully concealed, which is that this decision is fundamentally--and unavoidably--an intensely ethical choice.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-28 00:00:00 Tanner Rowland Periodically I return to this great book, not only to squeeze every last drop of wisdom from it, but also to simply enjoy its prose. Organizationally, the book is discursive, yet coherent. THE COHERENT WHOLE: The plan of the book is four-fold. (1) We notice that even in the most objective sciences, we have to make subjective judgements. The situation relies even more on our subjective selves the less formalized a discipline becomes. (2) This observation spurs a long meditation on how our objective standards and subjective skills go together. The melding of the two, of the subjective and objective, is what Polanyi calls Personal Knowledge. (3) This meditation allows us to attack the question, How can we be confident in our knowledge, seeing that it relies on our finite and error prone selves? The answer is, strangely perhaps, that though our judgements might be erroneous, we nevertheless feel compelled to make personal commitments to making our worlds of experience more satisfactory. (4) Our conclusion opens up a view of all of life, where each creature uses its tacit skill to achieve unprecedented forms of understanding. The discarded view is the idea that life's creative outburst is the result of mechanistic, formal processes. The new view is that life's lifeblood is a organic gestalt, where parts contribute to wholes in unprecedented and non predictable ways. THE DISCURSIVE SIDE: Outside of this main plan, yet contributing to it, we travel over a huge range of territory. Physics, mathematics, psychology, biology, politics, history, religion, philosophy are all called into play. Along the way, we critique Marxism, scientism, mechanism, anti-traditionalism, over-traditionism, rationalism and more. It's quite an adventure. In it all, Polanyi says, "look and see how it all goes together." And it does. APPRAISAL: History and tradition might, and I think should, look upon Polanyi's work favorably. It is a very well argued work. His discursive range is vast, and for dilettantes, a smorgasbord of delight. And large portions of it are incontestably true (very rare for philosophy). A blemish appears to me Polanyi's realism. It seems Polanyi is unsure that we ever actually make contact with the real world, though we must nevertheless accept naively the appearances we're given. It would have been better if he had been aware of or argued for an Idealist conception of reality, where what is given in experience is actually the world. In this case, a gnawing sense of unreality about our knowing acts, would have transfigured into a joyful contact with actuality. But this means, at least, Idealists can appropriate his thoughts and feel their full vigor.